The service sells 3D models focused on gaming uses, providing a variety of terrain, buildings and structures for fantasy, future and historic genres. Buy a model, print it at home or on any 3D print service, paint the print and you have another excellent piece for your game.

As you can see in the example above, finishing is critical for completeness. After printing, careful painting can produce incredibly detailed structures, overcoming any 3D print resolution issues.

Pricing of the models is relatively inexpensive, with many items in the USD$5 range. Printable Scenery also collects related items into “Packs” to simplify things.

Mathew Barker of Printable Scenery explains some of the challenges in designing the components displayed at Printable Scenery:

The main challenge for me is to keep everything to scale. I often get designs with no elevations, and only one perspective drawing, and then have to extrapolate the dimensions of all the other parts of the design. In animations you can fudge the small numbers, but for printing you need to be exact with everything.

All the details have to modelled into the mesh as we cannot cheat anything with textures or normal maps. This way the model quickly becomes very hi-poly and can be a nightmare to change once the details have been added after long hours of modelling.

Creating brick patterns that don’t tile or repeat can take a while to model - as opposed to in animations, where applying a tile-able texture is much easier. This all becomes more painful when changes are requested, making locking down concept designs an absolute must. Changing the size of bricks in a texture is one thing, re-sculpting an entire building is another entirely.

You also have to keep in mind the spacing and angles of elements that will print correctly. Sometimes gaps that are too small will fuse, and holes that are too large will require messy supports if not planned out beforehand.

There has to be a physical prototyping process for each model, which makes things pretty costly and stressful at times, but the results are always overwhelming if the prints are good and the hard work pays off!

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has been writing Fabbaloo posts since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!

Fabbaloo is a daily online publication focusing on the 3D print and additive manufacturing industries. We provide deeper analysis of developments in current and future technologies as well as corporate matters. If there’s something happening in 3D technologies, especially FDM, SLA, SLS and Stereolithography, we’ll have an opinion about it.